Posted
by
Soulskill
on Friday October 05, 2012 @06:07PM
from the more-bits-per-buck dept.

crookedvulture writes "SSD prices continue plummeting. In just the past quarter, street prices have fallen by double-digit percentages for most models, with some slashed by 30% or more. We've reached the point where the majority of drives cost less than a dollar per gigabyte, and that's without the special coupon codes and mail-in rebates usually attached to weekly deals. Lower-capacity drives seem more resistant to deep price cuts, making 120-256GB offerings the best values right now. It's nice to see a new class of devices go from prohibitively expensive to eminently affordable in such a relatively short amount of time."

Yes, it absolutely does with flash memory. This is a known issue-- just google the write endurance of 25nm flash vs 34nm.

Whether or not it is a sufficient difference to worry about is another issue-- but absolutely a 1GB flash stick will last longer on 34nm process than it would on 25nm process. Of course, that also ignores that smaller processes will generally have higher capacities, which causes the endurance of a particular cell to be less important.

I've been waiting for "enterprise" SSD prices to drop for ages, because even though I'm now on my fourth consumer SSD, I've only seen SSD drives in the enterprise space for three out of the last twenty customers or so! Anything esoteric you plug into a server magically becomes 10 to 50 times as expensive. Currently, that's SSD drives and GPUs. The latter has only some niche uses, but everybody could benefit from 1000x lower I/O latencies.

I recently noticed that there's a new OCZ brand [oczenterprise.com] for enterprise SSD storage. They sell drives in every form factor, and with very impressive specs. Their drives are already between the $3-$7 per GB mark and dropping. Until recently, most vendors were selling the same kind of thing for over $15 per GB, which is insane.

Enterprise SSDs are actually different from consumer SSDs though. Most Enterprise SSDs generally have higher IOP counts so you can get higher random access reads off them. The $15/GB drivers you saw were also likely SLC, SLC has a single bit per cell while MLC has two bits per cell. The cheaper OCZ is very likely an MLC drive.

I'm also an engineer at an SSD company. The problem honestly is the firmware of an SSD is quite complex. It is juggling lots of data around the NAND while coping with the uncertainties of NAND behavior. Testing the firmware to find all the bugs is a major effort also.